


an exceedingly mutually understood and well coordinated time

by Prim_the_Amazing



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alpha Steve Rogers, Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Beta Bucky Barnes, Beta Sam Wilson, Multi, Omega Natasha Romanov, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-25 03:47:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16653679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing
Summary: “What are you two talking about over there,” Steve calls out from the other bed.“Your dumb ass,” Sam says.“Bucky Barnes’ true location,” Natasha says.“Don’t tease him like that,” Sam says.“I’m going to sleep,” Steve decides.





	an exceedingly mutually understood and well coordinated time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZepysGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZepysGirl/gifts).



It’s about a week into ‘Sam and Steve’s Grand Road Trip Adventure To Hunt Down and Shoot A Net At Captain America’s Murder Ex and Drag Him Back Into a Loving Relationship Kicking and Shrieking’ that the telepathic stirrings between them actually start to register for Sam.

Okay, so. He can explain. He knows that it sounds pretty ridiculous that it took him a whole week practically glued to each other’s sides plus that entire action fueled debacle of taking down Hydra’s sky murder ships to realize that Steve and he are potential soulmate material, but this is _not_ his fault. He noticed the weird not-his thoughts slipping into his mind within the third day after first meeting Riley, when it was barely just him getting Riley’s cravings for cheese. (Sam hates cheese. Cheese hates _him.)_

This is not Sam’s fault. It’s _Steve’s_ fault. The superserum gave him a six pack and the scent glands of an alpha on coke who’s ready to fuck, kill, and die in that order all within the same afternoon. Which is pretty unfortunate for Steve, since it baits every alpha with an ego on the block to try and insecurely flex at him. Steve would fight god himself, but anyone would get sick of that much posturing thrown in their direction every single day.

Even with all of the windows rolled down, being cooped up inside of the same car, diners, and motels as him day in and day out pretty much immersed him in Steve’s scent to the point that he can barely remember what _he_ smells like. Of course he knows that Steve’s cranky or sleepy  or wistful or mildly gassy -- his damn pores are shouting it at the entire world.

But a week in he starts thinking about lovingly stroking the Winter fucking Soldier’s greasy lank hair and gazing adoringly into his shark-flat eyes while brushing his teeth, and it’s enough to make the realization dawn over him like a rudely thrown glass of water. There is only one person in the world who would want to cuddle with that walking ball of knives, guns, hostile scowls, and leather. There is only one reason why Sam would be having intrusive thoughts about doing that exact thing now, like sticking his hand inside a crocodile’s maw.

Sam inhales his toothbrush and almost dies. Steve comes barreling through the motel room door like the hounds of hell are on his heels and performs the Heimlich maneuver on him. The toothbrush goes shooting across the room and straight into the toilet with a _plunk._ Steve could crush the basketball world if he wanted to. Then again, maybe the serum would count as performance enhancing drugs.

“You survived, fought off, and defeated a dozen armed Hydra goons a few days ago,” Steve says, looking only a touch wild eyed after Sam’s crushingly mundane brush with mortality.

Sam wheezes and washes the toothpaste foam off his face in the sink. “Thought you were going out for groceries.”

“Yeah, I was, but then I… got a bad feeling?”

Fuck. Yeah, this is definitely happening. Sam is dismayed. Steve’s a great friend and… yeah, he’d probably make for a great boyfriend too, but _Bucky._ (Riley.)

He doesn’t even consider trying to hide it, though. Sure, Steve might be a pace behind him in figuring it out, but keeping secrets is kinda against the entire point of a soul bond. The more time you spend with the person you’re compatible with, the more in tune your minds are, the more clearly you can hear each other’s thoughts from a great distance. It’s only a matter of time before Steve will be hearing Sam loud and clear and undeniable, no matter how lovelorn or distracted he is. Plus, it’d be kinda uncool to lie about it anyways.

So Sam tells him.

 

The Soldier has a list. A list of people, inside his head. Everyone who’s worked on him, ordered him, that he saw in hallways wearing lab coats and uniforms. He has no idea how many of them are already dead, what with time jumping like a skipping record for him, years gone by in the blink of an eye, put to sleep by a tech and then awakened only a moment later by the same tech with grayer hair and more wrinkles, but he has to check and make sure. It’s mostly just faces. He’s not good with names. He’s not supposed to use them. It’s sir or nothing.

_Bucky, it’s me._

Steve.

The Soldier shivers.

He gets a hold of himself and breaks the lock and enters the house. It’s a nice house, which means better police response times, better security. Not too good for the Winter Soldier, though. He stalks the hallways, climbs stairs, sees pictures on the walls. Children, a woman. A man. A familiar face with only more lines and gray hair. Yes. That’s one of the faces on his list. He keeps silently walking up stairs. He opens two doors and finds the right room. Puts a knife through the man, sleeping in his bed. He wakes up, gurgles, panicked in the dark. He knows how it feels now. The wife wakes up, stirred by the sound and the man’s weakening fumbling. A light sleeper. It’s dark, she’s just woken up, she doesn’t really see. Just a bulky silhouette looming over her bed. She screams, terrified. He retreats efficiently, leaving her behind to call the police, his pain and her fear a familiar scent clinging to him.

Police are useless. They won’t be able to catch him. Scent dogs can’t track him. His scent is muted and dead, like a corpse that doesn’t even reek of rot any longer. Like a skeleton. Can’t smell what he’s feeling, how he is, what he is. _Assets don’t have a presentation, obviously._

When Steve had looked at him at the helicarrier, bleeding and sprawled out in surrender beneath him, the Soldier had somehow _known_ that he did not see something scary. Everyone sees something scary when they look at the Soldier. He can smell it, even nerves on the Hydra's who were confident they had full control over him. _What if he turns on us,_ they’d thought. _What if he hurts_ us. For some reason, this had just made them hurt him more.

Steve had not seen something scary. His chest had ached, but it wasn’t fear. The Soldier isn’t used to noticing when people feel something besides fear or pain or anger. It’s the only thing he can smell. He had thought that that was what it had always been like for him, but maybe that was a lie from Pierce. He can’t remember what happiness or sadness smells like any longer, if he ever did. Is it like flowers? Bakeries? Soap? Cats? Can he ask someone? Who? Steve? Does happiness smell like Steve?

Steve had smelled like sweat and blood and concrete dust. Does he still smell like that? Did he take a decontamination shower?

He can’t stop thinking about him, even though he has the list to go through. Stupid.

It had been very nice to be able to tell right away what Steve felt, though. He doesn’t know how he did it. He’ll have to figure it out, if he ever sees Steve again through anything but a rifle scope (just looking, just watching, finger not even on the trigger, no ammo).

 

One morning when Steve and Sam get into the car (and Sam’s acutely missing showering in his own bathroom, Steve can tell, he just knows that because they’re soulmates apparently, he has _two_ soulmates and how _amazing_ is that), Natasha pops her bubblegum from the backseat.

“JESUS,” Sam says, spilling his drink.

Steve sheepishly tries to look like he didn’t just flinch towards his gun.

“You guys should check the backseat before getting in,” Natasha says. “Do you have any idea how many people I’ve killed exactly like this?”

“Maybe don’t greet your friends the same way you kill people?” Sam says.

Natasha smiles.

And that’s how Natasha joins the road trip.

Natasha is an omega that both gleefully plays into and spits in the face of stereotypes at the same time. She has long shiny red hair and pretty makeup and slinky heels and outfits, and she smiles and flirts and laughs, and then she stabs and shoots and kills and steals top secret information and defects countries. Both of those sides are a part of her, but Steve doesn’t feel like either of them are the ‘real’ her. The real Natasha is the one who’s unashamedly manspreading in the back of his car while text-harassing Clint and Tony at the same time and gently headbanging along to something that kind of sounds like Russian heavy metal and eating the snacks Steve and Sam had bought for themselves.

Steve looks at her effortlessly tossing a gummy bear into her mouth without looking away from her phone in the rearview mirror and grins. He and her get along swell, but they mostly just interact in short intense bursts during highly distracting missions due to the fact that they’re both workaholics. They spend quality time together, but not quantity time. Not much time. It’ll be nice to change that for a bit, while this search continues.

Hopefully it won’t continue for _too_ long, though. He misses Bucky.

 

Sam thinks about Riley. About realizing that he’s got soulmate potential going on with this dumbass in his troop. Getting to know this dumbass. Falling in love with this dumbass. Telepathy really helps speed things along. That, and living a dangerous adrenaline fueled lifestyle that could kill you at any moment.

Somehow, for some reason, he hadn’t actually expected for one of them to die at a moment. Not Riley, at least. He hadn’t expected the way the fear and the pain would crest and peak and drive him mad with the need and inability to help, with worry, and then it would just as suddenly… go away. Vanish. Like there was a black hole inside of his head where love and Riley had been only a moment ago.

There is not ‘one’ soulmate out waiting there for you. The human race is vast, huge. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people out there waiting to be get along with you famously. But you need to spend a lot of time around someone before that clicks, before the bond grows strong enough to be noticed. Everyone has probably met, even _talked,_ to a _dozen_ potential soulmates, and walked away without knowing it because it was just a one time meeting, or they just happen to never really hang out with Debra from accounting because they feel like they already have enough friends. With this, noticing a soulmate happens rarely. A once in a lifetime sort of thing, if you’re _lucky._

Sam has noticed a potential soulmate for the second time in his life. He’s undeniably lucky.

He thinks about his and Steve’s action packed, adrenaline fueled lifestyle. How they could die at any moment. About that black hole opening up in his mind again. He can’t take that fucking _again._ He can’t. He doesn’t want to. No.

Steve had felt so happy when Sam had told him about what was happening that he’d been taken entirely off guard. Pleased surprise, like this was a good thing and he totally wasn’t obsessed with some other person whose name rhymes with sucky.

Did they have polyamory back in the Good Old Days? Fuck, they didn’t even have betas like Sam dating alphas like Steve back then. Not publicly, at least. How deep was Steve into the underground old timey queer community. These are the things he needs to know and that the history books aren’t telling him.

Sam imagines trying to share a boyfriend with the Winter Soldier and shudders. He doubts Hydra bothered teaching him ‘Sharing is Caring’.

Steve’s head pops into the room. “Sam?”

“Yeah?” he says, like he can’t smell the worry coming off of Steve like the most eye watering pungent perfume.

Sam wonders if he or Steve is the one who keeps thinking about Riley’s face, but then he thinks about Riley falling out of a train which literally never happened, which firmly puts this at Steve’s feet.

“Stop projecting,” he says, “I’m not gonna crash a plane into an ocean without a good reason or something, Steve.”

Steve flushes. “I had a good reason!”

“Hundreds of historians say differently. Want for me to phone one?” Is he being mean right now? He’s being mean right now. He needs to chill out. He hasn’t even cemented the soul bond. He’s not _going to_ cement the soul bond. So long as they don’t have sex it’ll start fading away the second they stop spending so much time together. He just has to not jump on Steve’s dick or become his roommate and then everything’s gonna be fine.

“I can feel you feeling guilty,” Steve says, “I forgive you.”

“You dick,” Sam says, because he’s definitely being a dick right now. Steve thinks that Sam hasn’t caught onto his pious ‘so nice you feel bad’ Captain America act? Fuck him.

“Hey,” Steve says, wounded. That’s also a part of his act. Sam isn’t buying it.

“What’s this?” Natasha asks, and both of their heads whip around to see her leaning against the doorframe to the bathroom, wearing sweats and eating cheetos.

“How long have you been in there?” Steve asks. “That bathroom doesn’t have windows.

“How did you open that bag without me noticing!?” Sam asks. It’s a _cheetos bag._ He should’ve been able to hear it from the goddamned parking lot. “How have you been eating it?”

Natasha bites down on a cheetos with a crunch. “So, you’re soulmates.”

“Uncemented--” Sam says.

“We didn’t mean not to tell you--” Steve says.

Natasha crunches some more cheetos as they make their excuses, her hand delving progressively deeper into the bag and the cheeto dust creeping further up her arm. Eventually, she just opens her mouth wide and tips the crumbs at the bottom of the bag into her lipsticked maw.

Sam wishes he knew what she was feeling. Her facial expression is usually parked in neutral, and she’s got a weirdly muted scent. Not in a creepy way like she doesn’t have any emotions, like the Winter Soldier had not-smelled, but like she’s just not feeling anything strongly in particular at the moment. Lots of people smell that way during the day, to the point that it doesn’t stand out when she’s walking past and briefly interacting with strangers. It probably even helps her blend in, which is actually probably why she can do it in the first place. But if you get to know her you’ll notice that she _always_ smells like that, which just can’t be true. It’s like she’s wearing a mask.

Steve claims that she doesn’t smell that way when she’s relaxed, though. She looks pretty damn relaxed now, but unfortunately Sam can’t confirm Steve’s proclamation because fucking _Steve_ is here and it is impossible to smell a calm spy over Steve ‘let's crack some Nazi skulls to bits and then hug passionately’ Rogers.

“Well, if my advice is welcome, I’d just say not to do anything drastic until we’ve located Barnes.”

“We weren’t gonna do anything _drastic.”_ Drastic clearly being code for fucking, here.

“Fine,” she says easily, “good to hear. You forgot to get me a bed, by the way. I’m bunking up with one of you tonight.”  

“I can--” Steve says.

“By which I mean Sam. I’m not sharing a single with a behemoth, Steve.”

“I am a national treasure,” Steve says.

“I’m an immigrant. You’re just going to have to hug your pillow tonight, sweetcheeks.”

“Am I gonna get a say in this?” Sam asks.

“You can sleep in the car if you want,” she says helpfully. A twinkle enters her eyes. “Or, to make it fair, you could fight me for the right--”

“I’m good! I’m great at sharing, this is gonna be the best.”

“I’m so glad the two of you are getting along,” Steve says in his secret jerk way. Sam flips him off.

After about two hours of puttering around and chatting and snacking and taking turns in the bathroom, they get to bed. Sam stiffly lies down, a solid third of his body not actually on the bed.

“Is that a training exercise?” Natasha asks, taking off her fake lashes and putting a gun underneath the pillow. “Is that how all paratroopers sleep nowadays?”

“I’ve got a question,” Sam says.

Natasha hums.

“Is there a possibility that you might stab me if you get suddenly woken up?”

“No,” she says, smiles. “But I warn you, I am a kicker.”

“That’s almost as bad.”

“The Red Room has made me inherently irredeemable.”

“Sleep kicking’s the true sign to spot a Russian spy.”

“Our only tell.”

“What are you two talking about over there,” Steve calls out from the other bed.

“Your dumb ass,” Sam says.

“Bucky Barnes’ true location,” Natasha says.

“Don’t tease him like that,” Sam says.

“I’m going to sleep,” Steve decides.

“Good night,” Natasha says sweetly, and rolls over and falls into kitten cute sleep. Sam doesn’t buy it until her mouth falls open and she starts drooling into the pillow. Her hand doesn’t move from underneath the pillow. He’s never seen her face without makeup before. She looks less like a picture perfect omega, ready to be sweet and helpless. She looks tough.

It weirdly enough relaxes him enough to edge a little bit more firmly onto the actual bed, and soon enough he falls asleep.

He dreams about dancing, doing flawless pirouettes and then a high kick he knows could reach and crush a grown man’s windpipe underneath a strict teacher’s supervision. He has to be flawless. He can be flawless. His hair is red.

“People never expect brutality from omegas,” the teacher says, and the words reverberate in the acoustics of the room, echo into his mind and sinks in, significant, “which is one of your greatest advantages.”

Perfect balance on his toes, his arms stretching towards the ceiling.

“Use it. Enhance it. Nurture it. Craft yourself until anyone who looks at you will only see gentleness, but you can wield fierceness perfectly. Like ballet. A beautiful and graceful art on the surface, but unforgiving and merciless in practice for the performer.”

He moves smoothly like water, like it’s effortless. His entire body aches. They’ve been doing this for hours.

A girl next to him sways. She gets knocked down with brutal dismissiveness by the passing instructor for her faltering. He doesn’t get touched. He’s flawless.

“Killing is like ballet. Make it look beautiful. Be merciless.”

Sam wakes up. Natasha has just kicked him sharply in the shin. Her feet are like icicles. She restlessly rolls over.

“Riley,” she says softly, like she’s calling out for him.

Sam closes his eyes and swears softly. Again? Seriously? This is ridiculous.

 

Natasha finds an excuse to leave.

She’s got a lead on where Barnes might be, where he might be going, but Sam and Steve aren’t exactly spies, and a one woman infiltration team will always be subtler than anything else. It’s best if she goes alone. The information is important. Her reasons are valid.

Her motivations make it an excuse, though. She’s leaving because by now she can hear Sam be mad at politics when he’s surfing on his phone and Steve wondering if any new slang he hears is actually real or an elaborate prank being played on him. She can _hear_ it. Which means that they can hear _her,_ her thoughts, her plans, her dreams, her nightmares, her worries, her weaknesses. She trusts them as much as she can trust anyone, but it still gives her hives, makes her daydream about faking her death and running away to start a new life in France. It wouldn’t even be the first time.

Soulmates. She’s never had one before, and now she has two.

“Fuck,” she mutters, and crawls into a vent. She squints her eyes and wrinkles her nose. It’s incredibly dusty in here. She doesn’t understand what Clint sees in this. Charming her way through a doorway is much more fun than wriggling through a tight dirty metal tunnel. _Carnies._

 _Natasha,_ Steve thinks. Natasha freezes, waits it out.

It’s not a message. He’s just thinking about her, wondering about her, hoping she succeeds, missing her. What a fucking guy. She keeps crawling. She hopes the bond fades back away soon, it’s distracting her.

 _Is she seriously in a vent right now,_ Sam thinks. _What is this, Mission Impossible._

The sad thing about long distance telepathy is that she can’t send Sam a _look_ right now.

 _Shh, she’s working,_ Steve thinks.

 _Thank_ you, Steve.

_You’re welcome._

She freezes again, and then after a long moment starts slowly moving again.

 

 _Steve,_ Sam thinks experimentally.

“Yeah?” Steve says, perking up from his bed where he’s been industriously pecking away at his phone with his pointer finger. Steve texts like a grandma.

Sam doesn’t know whether or not he wanted that result.

 _Pass out already,_ Natasha thinks with impatient annoyance. Sam is like eighty percent certain that she’s choking someone out with her thighs again. Sam’s amount of soul mates are starting to get ridiculously over excessive. Only three more and he’ll beat the world record.

“What designation was the-- uh, Bucky?” He’s wondered about this… some amount, in a morbid curiosity sort of way. The thing is that the Winter Soldier _doesn’t smell like anything._ He’d smelled like leather and gun oil, but those had just been the things on him, not _his_ scent. There hadn’t been a person smell at all. No alpha, no beta, no omega, no fear or anger or anything. It was horror movie levels of creepy, like taking off his mask only to see blank flesh instead of a face.

He couldn’t have always been that way, though. According to history books, James Buchanan Barnes, Captain America’s right hand and bosom buddy had been a regular human man. Sam couldn’t remember any mentions of what he was, though. He’s just curious.

He bets he’s an alpha, though. He’s got the large, muscular build, and he walks like he’s bulletproof.

“Beta,” Steve says after a brief beat of surprise at the sudden subject.

Sam shoots up in his bed. _“No.”_

“Yes.”

“No!”

“Yes! Really!” Steve seems both confused and amused by Sam’s horror, and then his expression slides into something gooier and more wistful, like Sam is starting to learn it does whenever he talks about the good ol’ days with ‘Buck’. “People would look at us and assume that I was the beta and he was the alpha. The looks on their faces once they got within sniffing distance always made us cackle like a couple of loons.”

Sam is not moved by Steve’s romantic old man nostalgia. Sam is thoroughly distracted by the fact that he shares a designation with Winter ‘smoky eyes dead voice murder bitch’ Soldier. That’s… so… _weird._

God. That should teach him to fucking stereotype, the fuck.

“They kinda looked just like you do right now, actually.” Steve is smiling _too much._ It is an attack. That dimple is a personal assault.

“Shut up.”

“Hey, when we catch up with him you guys can be beta buddies.”

“Man, shut _up.”_

A freaking _beta._ What the hell.

Steve, Sam, Natasha. Alpha, beta, omega. Together, hypothetically speaking, not that he’s ever thought about this (they’re _in_ his _head),_ the three of them would make a classic triad. Alpha, beta, omega.

Steve, Bucky, Natasha.

“Wanna go get some kebab?” he asks, immediately wanting to squash that truly idiotic line of thought.

“Yes,” Steve says with feeling, his hand in a chip bag, food in his mouth. “I’m _starving.”_

“Of course. You’re paying.”

“Don’t wanna wrestle for it?”

“My mama didn’t raise no fool, Rogers.”

 

Three kills later, when the Soldier snaps a targets neck a figure steps out from behind a corner. It’s a redheaded woman who seems familiar.

“Barnes,” she says.

She’d been fighting with Steve.

“I just want to talk--”

The Soldier jumps through a window and falls into a roll on the ground, comes up already running.

The woman, the Black Widow, pursues.

The Soldier has formidable stamina. He evades her.

The Widow has formidable tracking skills. She follows him.

They keep going for like that until even the Soldier wants to lie down and pant and consume an entire canteen of water. The sun is rising. He doesn't stop.

“This-- is-- ridiculous,” the Widow wheezes.

Barnes agrees. She should stop following him already.

“At least-- give me-- your-- number.”

His serial number? She should know that, with the Hydra files now leaked.

“Break!” she cries out. “Pause! Ceasefire! Temporary truce!”

The Soldier cautiously slows, tries not to topple over onto the alley wall he’s standing next to. The Widow slows to a stop, hands on her knees, head down and panting. Vulnerable position. Not smart. Doesn’t fit with what he’s seen of her before.

She’s not on his list, but she doesn’t know that.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, sounding like she’s run every single mile that she just did, too exhausted to even look at him. The Soldier could pull a gun on her before she’d notice. It makes him feel good, safer. It probably shouldn’t be making him feel good, but it does. “I just want to talk. Steve wants to talk.”

Steve. The man who’d looked at him, and the Soldier could just _understand_ him. The Soldier understands opponents, fighting, fleeing targets, but everything else is… hard. It hasn’t been relevant to his training.

That had felt even better, even safer. If the Soldier goes to Steve, he might forget about his mission, the list. He doesn’t want that. That’s unsafe.

“A successful negotiation requires a back and forth,” the Widow says, still not looking at him. She should have recovered sufficiently by now to stand properly. She’s doing it on purpose. Why? She’s not doing anything with her hands, he can clearly see them gripping her knees. She can probably only just barely see his boots through her hair.

“I’m working,” the Soldier says, because she’s right.

“On whose orders?” she asks, wary.

“Mine.”

“... Congratulations. What’s your mission?”

The Soldier’s silence is enough of an indication of how idiotic he thinks that question was.

“Fair enough. But just so you know, if your mission is killing nazis, well, I just want for you to know that killing nazis is my favorite hobby.”

More damning silence.

“Support always heightens an ops chance of success.”

“Unless the support is traitorous or incompetent,” he says flatly. His voice comes out flat all on its own. It’s how he sounds.

“You know I’m not the latter. The former, well.” She smiles, doesn’t lift her head. “Take a chance on me?”

She’s doing it to keep him calm, he realizes. Psychological manipulation, he thinks. She’s being kind, he thinks.

These two thoughts are not compatible, and yet he has them both. The latter one is foolish. The Widow is a renown spy. Spies aren’t kind, they’re smart.

“I’ve got pictures,” she offers.

“Of targets?”

“Of Steve.”

 

Shockingly, her half serious last gambit works. She starts asking Steve for daily snapchats and carefully tries not to let on inside her mind that she’s with Barnes, or else he’d storm across the three states separating them to find him. Steve is an overeager golden retriever, long separated from his favorite human and desperate to jump back into his arms with no abandon now that he’s caught his scent. Barnes is a wary, abused stray street cat. He has to be carefully, cautiously, slowly lured into love. He has to be wooed. Seduced.

She hands in her phone and watches him stare hungrily at the picture of Steve eating a giant whopper for breakfast, like he’s trying to memorize his face for a later police sketch. She knows that Steve isn’t on to her, because there are no intense crazy eyes going on in the picture. He looks sleepy and intent on his food. Good. She wouldn’t have been able to manage that with a cemented bond, or maybe even if she was within sniffing distance. She’s an expert at controlling her scent, body language, facial expression, voice, everything necessary to tell a convincing lie, but Steve’s nose is _insane._

“He misses you,” she says, a blatant stab at emotional manipulation. The thing is, she’s got an inkling that no one’s ever _tried_ emotional manipulation on him, besides maybe ‘oh god please don’t kill me!’

Barnes’ face does something complicated and brief and unflattering and then it’s over. It was not a conventional facial expression. She doesn’t think he really does those. Wearing a mask all the times does something to you. Tony pulls the most hilarious faces after spending too much time in the suit sometimes without noticing.

“Cover the exits,” Barnes says, reluctantly handing her back her phone, and heads towards the building, apparently as a direct response to her statement. Get rid of the targets faster, get to Steve faster. It’s a simple logic.

The Black Widow, reduced to watching the exits. Oh, what she does for her lovelorn, intense golden retriever.

 _Ugh,_ Sam thinks. It could be at anything, really. She can’t further inspect, because their bond is already weakening, details fading. It’s privacy. It’s relief.

It’s making her just a little bit antsy. She won’t be able to know if her boys are okay without calling them on her phone, something she wouldn’t really be able to do if they’re _not_ okay. Also if she’s busy watching the exits.

There are gunshots from further within the building.

Hmmmmm.

More gunshots.

Screw it, guard duty’s _boring._ She became too qualified for it before she hit puberty. She runs towards the ruckus. (That should be the Avenger’s tagline.) Takes down two people in kevlar on her way up. Their get up doesn’t scream Hydra to her, or army. Not quite the same enough to be entirely a uniform. Mercenaries. Bodyguards.

Barnes has been making people paranoid. Fun.

 _Guns?_ Steve thinks, so he’s picked up on that much at least. _Is Natasha okay?_

She tries to project reassurance as she crushes a man’s windpipe.

She’s not sure whether or not it works. A brief flare of irritation at the uncertainty, at the degradation in quality, like annoyance felt at a gun jamming.

 _Make up your mind,_ she thinks. _Is a bond good or not?_

“WIDOW,” the Soldier, only just heard through several walls. “DUCK.”

She ducks.

There is loudness and brightness and heat. She opens her eyes, blinks rapidly, and starts moving in a direction before she’s even entirely sure of what’s left and what’s right. She eventually stumbles onto the Soldier holding a rocket launcher.

“Where did you find that,” she says.

He says something that she can’t hear over the ringing in her ears. She points at her ears and shakes her head. He points to his left, and she looks. A bed. The target had been keeping a rocket launcher underneath his bed.

Fucking nazis.

There is a dead man on the floor some feet away. He isn’t fit, or wearing a small arsenal. The target. Some eugenicist scientist or weapons creator, most likely, or something else awful. She pats the Soldier on the arm, who tenses like she just went in for a backstab.

“Good job,” she says, probably weirdly loudly.

He looks at her in his flat, hard to read way. He leaves. She follows, and sets the building behind her on fire as they go.

 

The Soldier doesn’t really get it, but the more time he spends with the Widow, the easier she becomes to understand. Her expressions are still inscrutable, not revealing what’s truly underneath, her body language all languid and fluid like a constant silent lie and threat. A lie to stupid people who sees relaxed body language and thinks _civilian,_ a threat to smart people who see just how smoothly and easily her muscles shift and think _dangerous._

But she gets easier. She’s amused and fond when he looks at the Steve pictures. She misses her allies, Steve and the man with wings. She’s annoyed when she misses them. She likes crunchy and spicy foods and tapping on her phone and expensive makeup. She’s pleased when they work smoothly together out in the field.

The soldier is pleased when they work smoothly together on the field as well. He’s usually a solo operator with a handler on comms ordering him around. Teammates can’t keep up with him, only slow him down. The Widow doesn’t slow him down. She’s true support.

“This is the last one,” he says.

“I see,” the Widow says, and is excited and pleased without showing it.

The Soldier is excited and pleased as well. Excited to be done with the list, to try and interact with Steve, and pleased to be on the same page as the Widow, to be understanding her with such ease. Maybe this is just what happens when you spend time with people who aren’t Hydra. You understand them.

The Soldier thinks he might like spending time with people, if that’s the case. He’d never suspected that of himself. He’s surprising himself. Maybe he likes other things he wouldn’t expect, like loud music or lizards or hang gliding or fatty foods. He doesn’t know. He suddenly wants to try and see.

He really wants for this list to be over. He’d thought that maybe he’d enjoy it, killing the people who owned him. It’s not that he’s been disliking it, but. He’d rather be doing something else. Rather be… enjoying himself? Somehow. With Steve and the Widow, maybe. Just sitting with them and understanding them. But he won’t be able to feel safe until they’re gone. Hydra is top priority.

The target has been constantly on the move. He sleeps in cars driven by chauffeurs that switch out. He only stops for gas, to resupply and expel waste and swap out his protection, which is a time where his guards are highly on guard. He looks sweaty and scared from a distance. He is an obstacle in the Soldier’s way to sitting with his allies (?) and understanding them and being safe. In his way from discovering what foods he likes not because they’re filling but because they taste good. In his way from discovering the music he likes, the things and people he likes. He has no idea what any of them are, except for maybe the Widow and Steve and cats and plums.

“Trust me,” the Widow says, and he does because she has been a very good teammate. They find the mercenaries waiting at a drop off point to switch out with the other ones and decimate them, drag the bodies to a point and prop them all up like they’re sitting and resting. Except for one, whose clothes the Widow steals. The Soldier hides. The man knows what he looks like.

The car comes. The car stops. The mercenaries quickly start refueling the car, a contingent of them walking in formation around the man as he nervously walks over to a place to piss. The things money will persuade people to do. He has too much of it. The Soldier will kill him and release it back into the world. No next of kin.

The Widow walks up to the mercenary that walks in the dead mercenaries direction to presumably talk about the shift change. It’s strange that they’re not standing up, but not too strange. It’s hot. They’ve been waiting a long time. They don’t look dead, covered head to toe in helmets and armor.

They talk, and the Widow’s body language is confident, friendly. Disarming.

They shake hands. The mercenary leaves, walking at a relaxed pace, showing his back to the Widow. She does not strike. She does not signal for the Soldier to strike. The mercenary walks up to his mercenaries and they talk. They leave in the transportation the dead mercenaries had arrived in, the Widow waving them goodbye.

And just like that, the target is all alone with the Soldier and the Widow and a bunch of corpses, without a single shot fired.

The Soldier’s breathing is doing something strange and wheezy.

The Widow’s head snaps towards him from across the clearing. She shouldn’t have been able to hear him.

That’s _his sense of humor?_ he thinks in her voice. And then again, still in her voice, _no. Oh god, no way._ Again?

She isn’t looking at the target, is to the target’s perception intently looking at nothing in particular. The target is confused and nervous. The Soldier lines up his shot and takes it. He falls with an anticlimactic thump to the ground.

Victory.

The Widow has her face in her hands and is quietly groaning to herself. The Soldier doesn’t understand what the problem is.

 

There is a knock at their motel door at three in the morning. Sam’s got his gun out and ready before the scent creeping through the door crack hits Steve's sinuses and he grins and jumps to open the door because _Natasha’s back_ and _Natasha’s back with clues about Bucky (!!!)._

She really is the best at getting presents.

He opens the door, and Bucky is looming behind her shoulder, half threatening and half shyly hiding.

“Damn, she’s good,” Sam says.

“Damn straight,” she says.

Bucky does a small, awkward wave, still from behind her.

Steve, whose heart has finally started beating again (probably exclusively thanks to the serum only), lunges at Bucky, who grabs and throws him over his shoulder and smacks him back first onto the floor. Steve is _delighted._

“Are we fighting again!?” Sam asks frantically.

“Bucky,” Steve says, perhaps just a little bit dreamily. Bucky is staring into his eyes and has his arm trapped in a painful hold that’s stopping him from standing up. That’s alright. Steve’s fine with staying just here so long as Bucky stays too and holds onto his arm.

“I think this might just be their love language, Wilson.”

Actually, scratch that, he _desperately_ wants to rub his scent all over Bucky, fill up that Hydra created void of a smell. He misses Bucky’s scent. That’s alright. He has Bucky now, who’s way more important than his _smell._

“Steve,” Bucky says. He talks different now. More quietly, an awkward halting cadence to his words, like he’s not really used to talking. That’s fine. Steve went through a phase where he poorly tried to use modern slang, often with the result of everyone in the vicinity desperately trying not to burst into laughter in front of Captain America. Everyone changes. He also still poorly uses modern slang sometimes when he wants to make someone go through the painful trial of just barely not laughing.

 _Bucky,_ his entire being sings. He wants to bend him over the nearest surface and cement their bond so that they’ll never be separated again, never ever. He’ll never lose him or think he’s dead when he’s not again. He wants to _fuck_ him.

Sam, who’s spent so much time with him at this point that they might as well be bonded, chokes. Now he’s thinking about Sam being involved in the bending over as well. Then he gets greedy and starts thinking about Natasha being there too.

“He’s thinking dirty thoughts, isn’t he,” Natasha says knowingly.

Sam desperately doesn’t look at her while trying not to think dirty thoughts. It’s a bit like trying not to think about a pink elephant.

“You’re pink,” Bucky states.

He is. Steve’s the pink elephant, here. The horny pink elephant finally surrounded by all three of his soulmates. All _three._ Holy hell, he went from being a scrawny kid not even the army would accept to having three whole soulmates. He wants to keep them forever.

“Now _Barnes_ is thinking dirty thoughts,” Natasha mutters in an aside to Sam, which Steve hears perfectly for multiple reasons.

“Wait,” Sam says, “you’re--?”

“Mhmm.” She nods.

“No fucking way.”

“Yes fucking way, actually.”

“Holy shit.”

“Mhmmmm.”

“Does it,” Bucky says, “cover your whole body.”

“Uh,” Steve says, and clears his throat.

 _Want to know that too,_ Sam thinks, and then out loud swears at himself.

“We should find out,” Natasha suggests.

“That’s-- that’s a big decision, guys,” Sam says. “A bond cementing is permanent. Until death shit.”

“We might as well accept what fate is flinging at us, Wilson,” she says, and leans into him, like a cat looking for warmth and pets. “Imagine how good our coordination will be during ops.”

Steve laughs, surprised. “Do it for the ops, Sam.”

“Soulmates to spare,” Natasha says. “It’ll be nice to have someone with me during my heat next month. You can all take turns.”

Sam is _definitely_ thinking dirty thoughts now.

“Will finding out about your pinkness make me be able to understand you again,” Bucky says.

“Yes,” Steve says, “Essentia--”

Bucky rips his shirt in half.

“I missed you so much,” Steve says, and smacks his mouth against Bucky’s. Bucky seems to have ninety percent of his kissing skills mindfucked out of him, but he’s extremely enthusiastic which is more than enough for Steve.

“Guys,” Sam says. “Guys, not in the hallway.”

“What if I pulled the fire alarm, though.”

“Nat, no. Please.”

Bucky has given up on trying to rip Steve’s thick denim pants apart with his bare hands and is now trying to cut them off, like he doesn’t know what a zipper is. With all of those buckles and straps, maybe he doesn’t. Steve lifts his hips to give him better access. It’s fine. He has more pants.

“We need to get them inside the room, at _least._ Steve, please don’t let him stab your pants off, they’re the only pair you packed that aren’t khaki.”

Khaki is fine. Khaki is great. Bucky has a manic look in his eyes and is sawing Steve’s pants off at the crotch by now with a serrated knife almost as big as his forearm. It’s so hot.

“Boys,” Natasha says. Something that flits through Sam’s thoughts makes him look up, and maybe something that flits through her thoughts makes Bucky look up. She’s unzipping her catsuit, slow and seductive. She isn’t wearing underwear underneath.

“It’d ruin the lines,” she says, and takes a step backwards into the motel room. “Come on in. Sam, take your shirt off.”

“Well, if it’s for a good cause,” Sam says, eyes bouncing between Natasha slowly unclothing, revealing pale, lean, scarred muscles, and Bucky with a knife held very, very close to Steve’s dick.

They go inside the room. They have an exceedingly mutually understood and well coordinated time.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] an exceedingly mutually understood and well coordinated time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16728999) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




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